I would like to fix this, even though this might not be easy. Visual Basic evolved into MS Visual Studio, and I have no experience using the latter before. I downloaded a free version of MSVS, but it does not recognize the project (it expects prj files, while the 'master file' of the source I have is a .mak file). It also does not recognize the form definitions (.frm files), which apparenly changed format between VB 3.0 (binary) and VB 6.0 (text), so that when I try to import them in a new project, MSVS complains they are not valid .frm files. So this seems a dead end.
The 'business logic' of ShogiVar, residing in a .bas binary file, was included with the source files as a listing. I converted that listing to C (by hand-editing, as the Basic-to-C converters I could find (BCX and BaCon) crashed on it). So I have that in C syntax now, meaning it compiles virtually without errors. But the way it interacts with the GUI system is not functional; it seems to interact with a C++ system object defined in the .frm files, calling its member routines for hiding / showing objects, moving them around, or drawing lines and circles, which I replaced by a dummy struct upto now.
This method of interfacing looks as if it could still be the same in current MSVC versions. So rather than writing a completely new GUI in Windows API, I wondered if the following would not be far easier: create a new MSVS project, define forms for it as the VB 3.0 code had (where each form contains two timers, bitmap images for all the pieces, board squares for rendering them and a menu bar), by recreating it from scratch, (importing the .bmp files into it, which I have as separate files). And then import the hand-translated C code (after a few adaptations to use the MSVC interface again).
Could anyone with experience in MSVC GUI programming tell me if this sounds feasible (and sufficiently easy)? I was hoping someone with MSVS would be interested enough in this to cooperate with me in reviving this classic program.
